Editorial: Birthright amendment talk is mere diversion

Posted: Wednesday, August 11, 2010

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Get control of the United States' borders, and harshly punish those individuals and businesses who hire people who are in this country illegally. If this country and its leaders want to get some real control over the illegal immigration problem, that's the two-step plan that needs to be put in place. Will it be costly? Sure. Will it be difficult? Without question.

But it's far more straightforward than the latest effort in Congress - a Republican push to alter the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to eliminate "birthright" citizenship - to appear to be serious about addressing illegal immigration.

At issue for the Republicans is Section 1 of the amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified two years later, as a means of extending rights granted by the Bill of Rights to former slaves in the wake of the Civil War. It reads, in relevant part, that "(a)ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." In the years since its ratification, courts have interpreted the amendment to extend to the children of illegal immigrants.

So is there an issue here? Maybe. It's possible to believe, as House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," that the amendment provides some incentive for illegal immigrants to come into this country so that American citizenship is conferred on any children they have inside U.S. borders.

But that's only one facet of the illegal immigration problem. People coming into this country illegally also may be coming in to take advantage of opportunities to work, and for the ability to access services, such as emergency room care, that are available to them whether they or a member of their family are legal residents of this country or not.

And even if birthright citizenship is a major issue, a possible process for dealing with it - some effort to amend the Constitution to address the problematic part of the 14th Amendment - would be lengthy and convoluted. Amending the Constitution requires the agreement of two-thirds of the members of both the House and the Senate, and subsequent ratification by the legislatures of three-quarters of the 50 states. The Constitution sets no specific time limit for ratification of proposed amendments.

Beyond that, there are practical concerns as to how any constitutional amendment, or any other means of rendering the problematic portion of the 14th Amendment null and void, would be enforced.

As Sherrilyn Ifill, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, wrote in a recent commentary for National Public Radio, "The prospect of policing maternity wards to identify and deport newborns of undocumented immigrant parents makes the idea of repealing the birthright-citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment repugnant ... ."

Outside the likelihood of emotional reaction to the scene painted by Ifill is the stark truth that, if this country truly would secure its borders and establish harsh criminal sanctions for those who hire illegal aliens, that scene need never be played out in an American hospital.

So why are members of Congress even talking about a probably impractical, possibly unimportant and potentially emotionally fraught adjustment of the 14th Amendment? One conclusion that might be reached is that lawmakers - both Democratic and Republican - want to create the impression that they're working on the problem of illegal immigration when, in fact, they're merely postponing the hard choices that both they and the American people know need to be made if the problem is to be addressed definitively.